FREE NEWSLETTER: Econintersect sends a nightly newsletter highlighting news events of the day, and providing a summary of new articles posted on the website. Econintersect will not sell or pass your email address to others per our privacy policy. You can cancel this subscription at any time by selecting the unsubscribing link in the footer of each email.

Please share this article - Go to very top of page, right hand side for social media buttons.

You set out for a nice walk along a seemingly pristine beach but once you're out on the sand, it's clogged with plastic bottles and other garbage. A grim report estimates that there are over 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic weighing over 250,000 tons floating on the world's oceans. All of that pollution has had a serious impact on the environment with evidence even suggesting that marine organisms as far as 10km beneath the surface have ingested plastic fragments.

The infographic below shows the distribution of plastic pollution across the world's oceans. The North Pacific has the highest level of contamination with nearly 2 trillion pieces of plastic while the Indian Ocean comes second with 1.3 trillion. According to a recent Greenpeace report, the world's top-6 companies sell plastic bottles weighing over 2 million tons every year - that's the same weight as 10,000 blue whales. Even though all plastic bottles can be recycled, unfortunately a huge number of them still end up in the ocean and landfill rather than the recycling plant.

This chart shows the number and weight of plastic pieces afloat at sea.

The growing use of ad blocking software is creating a shortfall in covering our fixed expenses. Please consider a donation to Econintersect to allow continuing output of quality and balanced financial and economic news and analysis.

Keep up with economic news using our dynamic economic newspapers with the largest international coverage on the internet